“I love this book. Profoundly spiritual and hilariously specific…an unusual and intimate epic that manages to capture the wonder and terror of both child and parenthood with an uncanny clarity.” — Lena Dunham, bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl

Edgar and Lucy is a page-turning literary masterpiece–a stunning examination of family love and betrayal.

Eight-year-old Edgar Fini remembers nothing of the accident people still whisper about. He only knows that his father is gone, his mother has a limp, and his grandmother believes in ghosts. When Edgar meets a man with his own tragic story, the boy begins a journey into a secret wilderness where nothing is clear–not even the line between the living and the dead. In order to save her son, Lucy has no choice but to confront the demons of her past.

Profound, shocking, and beautiful, Edgar and Lucy is a thrilling adventure and the unlikeliest of love stories.

“This tale gradually exerts a fiendish grip on the reader.” — Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand

“I tore through the luminous pages of Edgar and Lucy as if possessed…What this book has to say about love and truth will stay with me for a very, very long time.” — Sophie McManus, author of The Unfortunates

“A quirky coming-of-age novel that deepens into something dark and strange without losing its heart or its sense of wonder.” — Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of The Leftovers

“Victor Lodato may be our bard of the sadness, humor, and confusion of loss. He senses the absurdities and elation of mourning and childhood with a capacious precision that brings to mind J.D. Salinger, Lorrie Moore, Karen Russell, even James Joyce. Edgar and Lucy will make you feel things you haven’t felt in ages.” — Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West

This program is read by the author.

“As with all my work, Edgar and Lucy started with the character’s voices, and the rhythms of their particular ways of speaking… because I have this very distinct sense of the sound and rhythms of Edgar and Lucy, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to record the audiobook. Also, having grown up in New Jersey, I felt I could do justice to the world of the novel, and to the north Jersey accent.” — Author Victor Lodato on why he chose to narrate his own novel

I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it’s night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn’t slip, that’s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse. Awful is easy if you make it your one and only.
Fear doesn’t come naturally to Mathilda Savitch. She prefers to look right at the things nobody else can bring themselves to mention: for example, the fact that her beloved older sister is dead, pushed in front of a train by a man who is still on the loose. But after a year of spying and provocations, she’s no closer to the truth than she was the day it happened. When Mathilda finally cracks Helen’s e-mail password, a secret life opens up, one that swiftly draws her into a world of clouded motives and strange emotion. Somewhere in it lies the key to waking her family up from their dream of grief. To cross into that underworld and see what her sister saw, she has to risk everything that matters to her.